cooker

Here's a good discussion of the pros and cons of 'AVs'.

Are we going too fast on driverless cars? | Science | AAAS

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Mobile 155

Lets change the tone a bit. Have we done any research about what people are expecting from self driving cars and its effect on transportation? Not sitting in a dark room and dreaming but how some of this might effect how people move about. Here is something I read today. https://www.economist.com/internatio...wealthy-cities

I am not claiming it is the definitive answer but it does seem to agree with the idea that if, and that is a big if, self driving cars become available they will also change our perceptions of mass transit as well. More than likely for the same reasons cars have effected transit. It is not some major conspiracy it is an attempt to cater to the people and their wants and what they will pay for.

I don't expect to see many of these changes in a city near me in the next ten or fifteen years and maybe never. But I do believe the majority will decide what they want to spend their money on and if that means small vehicles buzzing around town and the death of the full sized bus so be it.

KraneXL

I don't believe AV will be restricted to specific route however, they will undoubtedly have priority routes (high-speed lanes) available to allow them to operate more efficiently.No they're not. I'm guessing those rooms are well lit. In any event, congress meets to plan your future every day.

Mobile 155

Good read. And here is another. https://www.wired.com/story/autonomo...inancial-ruin/

350htrr

Bah, humbug, that is the exactly the thing most people are/were worried about and thus... someone is suggesting that is going to happen is a... Bah humbug... Bah, humbug,.. Bah humbug... When GM bought all the trams and disposed of them in some major cities in the US, it was considered a step forward,... NOT, It was in GM's best interest to buy the trams and dispose of them, so people would NEED/HAVE to have cars to get from A to B... and, there in lies the modern version of life today, MADE, an almost necessity, by a company that had the resources to have achieved it's goals...

I-Like-To-Bike

And some of those who follow their own moonbeams seem to frequently find them when/where anyone doesn't share a taste for fabricating or embracing bizarre schemes and speculation.

Finding friends or fellow travelers who choose to join them on their strange path of enlightenment, probably not so much.

Mobile 155

Nice story and indeed the plot line of "Who Framed Rodger Rabbit," But not necessarily the truth and the whole truth. GM owned the buses that replaced the Trams. The Trams were not as flexible as a Bus and weren't as easy to add lines to as the city expanded into Suburbs. But that can be researched pretty easily. The car simply replaced the bus. Read or not or simply google it. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-gm-...ally-happened/

https://www.latimes.com/local/califor...103-story.html

But it is an interesting story.

350htrr

Yes it is an interesting story... and... Also seems to be correct even according to your link, as in it, it even says many were convicted and fined for conspiring to do what I said they did in 1946... yes, they were only fined a $1 per each electric railway car totaling $37,007. but legally they still did what they did and got their wrists slapped...

tandempower

Are you sure it wasn't just a conspiracy to cover up that the government was interfering with the supply and demand of drivers wanting those old streetcars and rails out of their way and the supply side heeding the demand? I mean, if drivers want to gang up against pedestrians, transit, cyclists, etc. that's just supply and demand, right?

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tandempower

How can you think that people's wants and their minds generally during that time weren't heavily under the influence of the economic and political pressures that surrounded the great depression and WWII? I have seen video clips from that time where automotive expansion is promoted by an attractive young woman supposedly independently voicing her opinion at a public meeting that expanding the automotive infrastructure will bring jobs, growth, and prosperity to her family for the present and future. People at that time were desperate for economic prosperity and they weren't capable of considering the negative repercussions of the ubiquitous driving and sprawl continuing to expand for decades to come.

If people were in support of modernizing transportation, and the trams were failing that could simply be because of economic patterns and desperation to escape depression. They could have just as easily revamped the rail systems and built vehicles for the rails, but they were probably obsessed with their latest technological achievements, such as synthetic rubber for tires, so they thought, "out with the old and in with the new" instead of remembering that rails are efficient in ways that tires and pavement aren't. If you can't see that there was neglect for the value of rail transit because of bias in favor of the automotive culture, then you must yourself be biased toward automotive dominance.

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tandempower

Getting everyone driving, then creating sprawl and overpaving to the point where walking and biking for transportation are not comfortable and convenient enough to be a popular option is not prosperity. Likewise, when growth depends on maintaining automotive expenditure levels when things would get better with the automotive population shrinking is not good growth. You don't understand economics is relative to the past. If you have a terrible health condition that you spend $100s monthly on and you suddenly figure out you can be healthy by exercising and eating healthy, that results in negative economic growth but it is better to be independently healthy. Do you not understand that? For you to say that choosing independent health is bad for growth and jobs means that you are advocating people stay unhealthy to keep transaction dollar amounts growing. That is terrible, don't you think?

I-Like-To-Bike

You are wasting your electrons.

Mobile 155

None of this is an answer to what dries an economy. You are posting wishes I am talking about decisions made by friends and neighbors. Did people have retirement benefits, investments, health benefits like they do now? I do not think a growing economy is a bad thing. There I have said it, success has its perks. Comfort for whole families.

But ILTB is right, you don't care about others or their comfort. You aren't interested in counter points. I don't even know if you have anyone living with you that you care for. I do,and many of the families from that time period to now did. They looked at what there was to be gained by jobs, prosperity security and economic growth and reached into their wallet and or voted. I know a lot of unhealthy poor people and plenty of healthy average people as well as wealthy people. Of the three the latter two seem better to me. It seems as if several million people agree.

Mobile 155

And I always though of myself as Don Quixote. Maybe this proves it.

tandempower

So basically what you're saying is that if selling cars and infrastructure generates more monetary transactions than bikes and non-motorized infrastructure, you and others are for that regardless of how good or bad driving might be in the grand scheme of things? That's your final argument? That the environment and quality of life and health and everything else that money can't buy can't be achieved without the growth and jobs ubiquitous driving generates and so you'd rather whitewash the drive-everywhere lifestyle for the economic benefits than admit there could be a better way?

350htrr

Conspiracy... What IS a conspiracy..??? Literary translations do NOT NEED to be really applied, to "become a conspiracy" in ... "result"... as... In lets say 10 business owners decide... ON their own violation, to do a certain thing at the same time, BUT the re-result can be the "same"... Forcing a sector of the economy, to behave the way they think it should behave... a thin line, once crossed can be a MAJOR problem, thus there "are" laws to "try" and control that...

Dave Cutter

Wisely thought-out..... but historically inaccurate. Outside the walls of ancient Rome was what citizens called suburbium, meaning what was literally below or outside the walls. Sprawl… pre-dates automobiles.. by hundreds of years. Recent events (of the past century or two) mimic a much older global history. Cars.... just happen to be here.
Cars have come... and they too will also past. Sprawl... we be with us long into the future.

Dave Cutter

The first verifiable claim for a practically used bicycle belongs to German named Baron Karl von Drais. Drais invented his Laufmaschine (German for "running machine") in 1817.

After two hundred years..... if the bicycles was going to generate noticeable monetary change.... it would have likely already have accomplished that. Bikes are a wonderfully elegant, and fantastic invention. But a monetary element of change.... NOT SO MUCH.

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tandempower

It's always a problem to dissect the issue of sprawl because, you're right, there's nothing about driving that causes sprawl. What driving does do, however, is make longer distances a norm for everything from work commuting to shopping to errands to children's activities. I don't know enough about Rome's suburbia that you mention to know how people got around, but I presume by walking mostly. Maybe children were homeschooled, but surely they walked around freely to get to whatever activities they were doing.

In other words, sprawl would not be such a problem if the various areas of a sprawling region were economically self-contained so people could walk and bike to do everything they needed to do. In fact, this is what I would expect LCF cities to be like if/when the drive-everywhere culture gives way to being able to lead a normal life without driving. But what has happened as a result of driving-dependency in terms of sprawl without sufficient bikeable/walkable options for work, shopping, school, etc. is a problem.

When people say what you are saying here, it only makes lucid discussion more difficult. Yes, there may have been sprawl and suburbs before cars, but why don't you acknowledge that people have become dependent on driving and that land is used inefficiently and overpaved because of the prospect of getting more traffic if people are driving all over the place all the time? The problem is that people are so desperate to defend that culture, which they know is problematic, that they focus on whitewashing it instead of just acknowledging the problems of it and how they could be solved by making LCF an easier choice.

Do you realize that there hasn't been an honest discussion about LCF and sprawl for years because of this desperate defense against change? At what point do the defenders acknowledge the validity of problems and accept that there are ways to work toward greater freedom to get around car-free?

tandempower

Yes, people can be wrong even when they are a majority and I've told you that countless times but you refuse to acknowledge I'm right. I don't believe there is true right and wrong in your mind, only popular opinion and whatever 'truth' money can buy. Likewise, there are so many reasons LCF is better that you just ignore and insist that it all comes down to how someone 'feels.' If they feel cars and automotive culture are ok and fine for the environment, then there's nothing wrong with going on building all these wide roads and highways and parking lots, etc. etc. that make it so difficult to choose to get around without a car. There's no reasoning with you because you are dead-set on defending the car culture against questioning.

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